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Dang it...I missed the small quake Last night we had a small 3.7 magnitude earthquake fairly close to Tacoma, Wash. Natalie felt it here at home, and I was in the area but I was still driving. Yesterday I spent all day in the car, driving a rental car back to Spokane and then retrieving our car that had broken down and was repaired. I feel like a long-haul trucker or something after driving 630 miles yesterday...
Do Unix underpinnings of OS X make Apple secure? A column on Wired argues that as long as much of the business and software development world is using Unix, the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X ensure a secure financial base for Apple. J. Bradford DeLong writes: "As long as the world's programmers continue to speak Unix, Apple's economic future - one perhaps greater than that of a niche player given the rumblings surrounding its apparent bid for Universal - is secure. I doubt that my current Mac will be my last." For more of the reasoning behind the column, read on: So Much for Economic Principle: Apple Computer's persistence defies the law of increasing returns.
Slot Combo Drive Update 1.0 Apple has released a software update for those using computers with slot combo drives, such as the one in my 12-inch PowerBook G4. Here are the release notes from the Software Update panel:
The update is a 1MB download... UPDATE: When I ran this on my PowerBook I was told I didn't need the update. Apple still suggests that you download and run the program to determine if your machine needs a firmware update.
A reminder from the weekend past
I mentioned the downside of our weekend bird research trip to Eastern Washington, but there were many upsides as well. Among them, some great birds and opportunities to put our aging Nikon CoolPix 950 digital camera to work in conjunction with our Swift spotting scope. The shot of the Yellow-headed Blackbird above was taken Sunday afternoon in the Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge near Spokane. Some great birding! Speaking of Nikon, I see this morning that a new 5.1 megapixel CoolPix 5400 has been announced. MacCentral has a short write up about the camera, and Nikon offers more details. It looks intriguing for a $799 camera, though I admit that right now my main digital camera interest is in a digital SLR such as the Canon EOS 10D...
What is Apple's greatest iApp? In the wake of Apple's latest update to iTunes, I got to wondering. Which of Apple's iApps ranks as a must-have, must-use tool for you? iTunes? iPhoto? iMovie? iChat? Or something iElse? My choice, despite the latest controversial update, is iTunes. It is the only iApp that lives on my Dock... Discuss your favorite iApp
Salam Pax is real, and Tekka will have the interview Why am I looking forward to the upcoming issue of the online magazine Tekka? How about an interview with weblog author Salam Pax? Mark Berstein writes about the interview and how it happened in a post on his weblog:
As a reminder, Tekka is a subscription publication that costs $50 for a one-year right to read. The coming edition will be the second for the publication...
If you use AirPort Extreme and VirtualPC, read on MacCentral notes an update to VirtualPC today that should be a must-have for users of new Macs with AirPort Extreme networking cards. VirtualPC 6.0.2 fixes an incompatibility with the AirPort Extreme cards, among other bug fixes and enhancements. Grab the download and get more info from the Connectix Web site.
Stream if you must MacMegasite offers a tip in the wake of iTunes 4.0.1:
This is just one of the options that would allow people to continue streaming their music even though it isn't built into the latest version of Apple's most successful iApp.
Transmit 2.5 offers more speed Transmit update improves performance - Panic has updated Transmit, its FTP client for Mac OS X. The new version sports performance improvements, according to the developer, and adds some new features as well. Transfers done using secure FTP (SFTP) are up to four times faster, and Transmit caches directory listings to make navigating remote FTP sites faster. [MacCentral]
No more Internet sharing in iTunes 4.0.1 update Apple takes steps to stop the use of iTunes as a Napster-like music stealing system with today's update to iTunes 4.0.1. According to the release notes for the 7.1MB update:
And so if you upgrade, be aware that you will forego the ability to share your tunes over the Internet. Will you be upgrading? Discuss iTunes 4.0.1
Emailchemy 1.5 looks like a useful tool If you have your email locked in a proprietary email format and want to move it to another format to work in Apple's Mail.app or Eudora for Mac OS X, for instance, then the $25 Emailchemy 1.5 application may be just the tool you need. It works with many proprietary email formats, though I notice the Web site doesn't mention PowerMail...
PowerMail updated to 4.1.3 PowerMail update improves searching, more - CTM Development has updated PowerMail, the company's e-mail application, to version 4.1.3. The Mac-only software has been in development for nine years. It's promoted by CTM Development as an "efficient, alternative" e-mail client that offers high-speed find-by-content using Sherlock search technology, multiple account support, and a compact memory footprint. [MacCentral]
On the other side of the journalism fence As a longtime journalist, reporter, and writer I am used to being the person writing the story, trying to get the terminology and names right to tell the story. I am also used to arranging the photos, not being in them. But this morning it is clear that, despite my best efforts last Friday, I not only ended up in the photo but was mis-identified as a "state naturalist" in a front page photo in The News Tribune this morning. I'm in the background, showing a volunteer at the Western pond turtle site how to use the radio monitoring gear to track where the turtles are located in the pond. I would like to consider myself a naturalist, but I didn't tell anyone I was a "state naturalist." I simply work out in nature on this short-term project for the state. Needless to say it is interesting to be on the other side of the journalism fence...
A long weekend adventure Mac Net Journal wasn't updated over the weekend as Natalie and I headed to the far reaches of Eastern Washington for more birding book research. At the end of the trip we ended up spending all day yesterday dealing with car problems, leaving our car six hours away in Spokane for repairs, and tracking down a rental car to get home later than planned last night. Picking up the pieces...
OpenOSX shipping a Gimp update OpenOSX ships Gimp update - OpenOSX is shipping Gimp 1.2.4 for Mac OS X, the latest version of the software that offers photo manipulation and graphic tools. Version 1.2.4 has been rebuilt for Mac OS X 10.2 and purportedly delivers over 200 percent performance spikes over the previous version. The update also features a customizable single-click installer that will install the list of requisite software libraries required to run the Gimp on Mac OS X, along with documentation (in both PDF and HTML formats), tutorials, over 100 fonts, brushes, patterns, 600MB of plug-ins and a mirror of the official Gimp Web site. [MacCentral]
The 12-inch PowerBook G4 is getting a lot of love I guess I am not the only person who is happy with the decision to buy a 12-inch PowerBook G4. Columnist Mike Wendland writes on his weblog this morning that he is still gushing over his Little AlBook, and writing on Low End Mac, Adam Robert Guha declares that in most ways his Little AlBook is an improvement over a Titanium PowerBook.
Letting go of some Mac history Yesterday I cleaned out the hard drives on a pair of old Mac desktop machines in order to give them to a friend for a benefit garage sale this weekend. The Macs, a Quadra 660AV and a PowerMac 7100, had not been in use at all over the last year or two, but I have been averse to getting rid of them until now. The Quadra especially has been a workhorse, as the machine that Mac Net Journal was first written on. It also had an extended life as a Web server, a server holding weather information from my Davis Instruments weather station, and for quite a while as an inexpensive way to watch TV in the office (with a VCR hooked to the machine, while was in turn hooked to the cable connection). Even today, 10 years after its manufacture, the Quadra can be a useful machine. Now the MNJ office is almost exclusively made up of PowerBooks. The only exception is a PowerComputing PowerWave that serves as a scanning station and could be put to work as a server or whatever else comes along since it is running OS 9.x with a G3 processor these days. It just needs more RAM and a bigger hard drive to be truly useful...
An O'Reilly interview with Brent Simmons Derrick Story interviews NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons in a piece on the MacDevCenter: Innovator Insight - A chat with Brent Simmons.
An article on Apple's spam filtering in Mail.app How Apple's Spam Filter Stacks Up - Apple's filter is a step in the right direction. It may not be the best filter, but it comes with the platform, it's easy to use, and it works well most of the time. (E-Commerce Times via MyAppleMenu) [myapplemenu]
Opera 6.0.2 joins the browser tangle MacCentral notes the release of Opera 6.0.2 today, signaling a turnabout in the Mac strategy for the browser and offering yet another Web viewing option for Mac OS X users:
Synergy looks cool, but my menu bar is crowded Synergy looks like a great shareware add-on for controlling iTunes under Mac OS X, but I am not sure I will use it for one major reason: My menu bar is already crowded. Synergy puts controls for iTunes in the menu bar, accessible at any time without the need to switch to iTunes. It's a great idea, but with the number of other menu bar icons floating around, I doubt I am the only person running out of menu bar real estate. This could especially be an issue for PowerBook users, since I know my menu bar issue is reduced once I hook up to an external 17-inch LCD. Speaking of iTunes controllers, TidBITS has been discussing the topic on TidBITS Talk lately... Discuss
Much better speed with DiskWarrior 3 I don't have a copy of the new OS X native version of DiskWarrior 3, but reports on Macintouch and elsewhere make it sound like there are some major improvements with this major update. Are you using DW 3 yet? Let's talk about it. Discuss DiskWarrior 3
Transforming iCal calendars with Java Transforming iCal Calendars with Java - You can store your iCal calendars on your iPod and check your appointments while enjoying music. But todo items from iCal don't synch, unless you change them to events. Daniel Steinberg shows you how to get todos on your iPod using a little Java 1.4.1. [O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com]
NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.3 NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.3 Ships
MacMerc on mastering the Services menu I admit that I don't use the Services menu under Mac OS X all that much right now, but MacMerc digs into the uses of the menu and how to get the most out of it in selected applications in Mastering the Services menu. This should be required reading for folks who want to get more out of their current version of Mac OS X.
The danger of blowing things out of proportion Hot on the heels of a series of articles about damage to his 17-inch PowerBook G4, John Manzione sings the praises of Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn update to Windows and why Apple is doomed in My totally misunderstood column of the day. To be fair, Manzione raises a few good points in his very long article, but in it he assumes that Microsoft will deliver everything it promises in Longhorn and that Windows PC makers will suddenly figure out how to deliver hardware with the same quality and coolness factor as present day Macs, and that Apple will not improve anything over the next 18 months. Interesting reading to a point, but anyone who has been following Manzione's writing since his PowerBook died knows the real reason he has written this story. He isn't happy with Apple, and what better way to get back at Apple than praising Microsoft and telling Steve Jobs what he is doing wrong?
Mike Wendland's spam filtering smackdown As spam increasingly clogs email in boxes the quest for a great spam killing solution continues. Mac columnist Mike Wendland offers the results of his latest experimenting in Spam filtering smackdown. Meanwhile, in my own case the Bayesian filters in the latest version of Eudora 6b18 for Mac OS X are doing a pretty good job killing the spam heading my way. My spam is also handled through filtering on the mail server, which caught more than 300 spam messages in one five-day period last week. Of course I still have to go in and weed through that mail for any valid mail that got caught in the spam filters, but out of those 300 messages none were valid email that I wanted to receive. I am still training the filters in Eudora to be more accurate, however... Discuss spam filtering
A decision well made, and still loving my Little AlBook It has been a couple of months since I bought and started using a 12-inch PowerBook G4 as my main Mac and so far I couldn't be much happier with the choice. Yes, this machine runs hot, which means that I will not be working with it in my lap too much as I wear shorts this summer. But the screen is crisp and works great both when I am sitting at home or in a campground in the middle of the Cascade Mountains, and the small size of the machine makes it easy to take on my bike across town or to sit with under the cover of willow trees while I write our Birding Washington book in between checks of the endangered Western Pond Turtles in Lakewood. Here is a quick overview of some of the compromises made when I bought this PowerBook and how they have stacked up over the last couple of months:
I still don't believe that this machine is a perfect fit for everyone. As I have written before, buying a PowerBook is an exercise in compromise. There is no way that any one PowerBook design can be perfect for every use I would have for a portable computer. In my case a smaller size and more rugged PowerBook with all of the modern Apple standards like AirPort Extreme wireless networking support and built in Bluetooth made the 12-inch PowerBook G4 a winning choice. Discuss a few months with a Little AlBook
How to compete with an Apple Store From the sounds of an article in the Puget Sound Business Journal, Apple Stores worry dealers, the arrival of the Apple Store in Bellevue and another store planned in the University of Washington area of Seattle could be good news for Mac users in the Puget Sound region. Competition is a good thing, and in many ways it sounds like the independent sales outlets for Apple gear will be making even more strides to go above and beyond what Apple offers in its stores. Of course, Apple has missed a golden opportunity by centering all of its efforts at the northern end of the metropolitan area in the Puget Sound region. As it stands today the southern parts of Puget Sound from Seattle south to my home town of Tacoma and beyond are left with very few local shopping options for Mac gear. And it will take something special to get me to drive either to Seattle or Bellevue to buy computer gear. Those are towns I drive through to go somewhere else, especially Bellevue, unless I am in Seattle to experience the arts or culture of the city and a run to a computer store would somehow fit into my trip. Discuss Apple Stores
WebPrint Plus X WebPrint Plus X sounds like an interesting program developed by an independent software developer, as noted in MacCentral this morning:
Turtle reflections
Yesterday was the 23rd anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, but my day was much more peaceful than that dramatic day back in 1980. I spent five hours monitoring Western Pond Turtles and compiling a daily bird species count for the South Puget Sound Wildlife Area in Lakewood, Wash. Just before leaving for the day around 4 p.m. I snapped the shot above of turtles basking in the sunshine, as they had been doing all day. The turtle in the back of the lineup is an ancient male that dwarfs the two females that are among the eight total egg-laying turtles that we track in the small pond complex.
MSN for Mac OS X The Washington Post notes the arrival of MSN for Mac OS X and its value as a first step toward Internet connectivity for those who still haven't joined the new century:
O'Reilly: Strategies for storing Web pages Location, Location, Location: Tips for Storing Web Site Files - So where do you store your web site files on your Mac OS X development server? The Sites folder, aliases to other locations on your hard drive, virtual hosts? Patrick Crowley (of iCalShare.com) shows you what he's learned from his experiences. [O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com]
Tips for making copy/paste work with X11 and Aqua Since I am using X11 and OpenOffice.org extensively these days, for all kinds of writing and other projects, I am very interested in ways to get around the problems with copying and pasting between OOo and standard Mac OS X applications. Sometimes it works great, and other times not so much. On a similar vein, MacOSXHints offers the following:
A potentially interesting comet coming next year Space.com offers an interesting story this morning about a comet expected to pass through our skies a year from now that may or may not turn out to put on a great show. Right now the comet is being referred to as NEAT, in honor of the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking team that discovered the comet in 2001.
Thunderstorms, funnel clouds, and a Green Heron
This has been a wild day, split between working on the computer at home and starting a new job. Yep, I am now an employee of the state of Washington, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to be exact. Over the next six weeks I will be working 20-25 hours a week observing and tracking endangered Western Pond Turtles at a wildlife area about 10 miles from home. And so my day was spent in transit between home and the wildlife area, dodging thunderstorms, being pelted by hail, and somehow missing a funnel cloud that was reported near our home in the north end of Tacoma. In the end, it turned out to be a good day. Tonight as Natalie and I were doing turtle monitoring we were able to spend 10 minutes or more watching the normally ellusive Green Heron in the photo above as it flew to the top of a tree snag and watched us watching it. And they pay people for this?
A new Safari beta Apple has rolled out a must-have new beta version of Safari that fixes security problems with the fastest Web browser for Mac OS X. Grab it now from the Software Update panel in your System Preferences application.
More follow up on X11 and sleep One more note to add about my problems having OpenOffice.org survive the process of sleeping and then waking up with a second monitor attached to my 12-inch PowerBook G4. Last night I proved that OOo and X11 would stay up when waking with a monitor attached. The key was that I didn't also hook up my USB keyboard and mouse before waking the machine. Maybe the USB devices are the key factor that was killing X11 when I would wake my machine... Why do I bother offering more of these updates? Maybe it can help others avoid the same niggling problems. That is the whole point of creating and running Mac Net Journal.
NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.3b4 released NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.3b4 includes the relevant bug fixes and changes from the recent release of the full version of NetNewsWire. See the change notes for details. This is the first release of a Lite-version beta in a few months. The plan is to finish NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.3 this week or next. Note: this release requires OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) or better. We will continue to make the last pre-Jaguar-friendly release available, even after NetNewsWire Lite 1.0.3 ships, for people who haven't upgraded to Jaguar yet. [inessential.com]
Distracted by birds while writing a bird book Today I am buried in work, finally writing chapters of Birding Washington after more than a year of compiling notes, photos, and research materials. It feels great to be getting down to the nuts and bolts of writing a book, but there are many distractions today. It started this morning when the first Wilson's Warbler of the season passed through the yard and I had to spend 20 fruitless minutes trying to get a photo of the bird with our Canon EOS A2. Then a few minutes ago as I was eating lunch the second Black-headed Grosbeak of the year showed up and skulked in our snowball bush for a while before flying out to look at the bird feeders and then flying off to the south. This time I got the photo, a pair of them, with the Canon, though not with my Nikon CoolPix digital camera. And just as I started to write this a pair of Pine Siskins stopped in the yard, joining the American Goldfinches that have been feeding off and on all day. Just how am I supposed to stay on task writing when all of these interesting birds are showing up in the yard? But I should look on the bright side...at least it isn't sunny so that I would be distracted by butterflies as well as the birds... Discuss birds
Why scripting languages matter Tim O'Reilly offers some interesting thoughts on Why scripting languages matter...
Combining NPR and the iTunes Music Store I bought my first full album through the iTunes Music Store this morning. Both Natalie and I were listening to Morning Edition from National Public Radio and we heard a profile of violin player Regina Carter and her new CD, Paganini: After a Dream. After Natalie IMed me that we should get the album, I checked the iTunes Music Store and for once a brand new album was actually available! The price: $8.91. And so, for about $5 less than we would have been able to find the physical CD in local music stores, we opted to get the digital version. This is a case where Apple's music store could really pay off in terms of convenience and immediacy. In the days before the iTunes Music Store I would have agreed with Natalie that we should get the CD, but by the time we would walk into a music store in a month or two there is no way we would remember the CD. This way we get the music we are interested in at a discount and the music industry gets a sale that it would have otherwise lost. Have you had similar experiences since the arrival of the iTunes Music Store? Are you still contributing to the growing number of tunes being downloaded from the service, which Apple notes has surpassed 2 million songs? Discuss the iTunes Music Store
A follow up on my problems with X11 and sleep In March I wrote about a problem I am experiencing when I sleep my 12-inch PowerBook G4 with X11 running (An X11 annoyance: Processes don't survive sleeping). It has taken too long for this to dawn on me, but this weekend's road trip in which I slept the PowerBook most of the time while keeping a .doc file open the whole time in OpenOffice.org running under X11 showed the root of my problem. The truth is that X11 processes do indeed survive sleep. What they can't survive is waking up with a second monitor hooked to my PowerBook. X11 shuts down every time if I either sleep the machine and wake it while hooked to my external 17-inch LCD or if I sleep the machine while already hooked to the external monitor and then wake it without the monitor attached. I just wanted to set the record straight on that long-standing trouble note... Discuss X11 and sleep
Get 10% off on Bare Bones products through June Bare Bones Software is offering a 10% discount on its software such as the excellent text processor BBEdit through the end of June, in celebration of the company's 10th anniversary. Place an order through the company's online store for the 10% deal.
Testing an 80GB notebook disk Accelerate Your Mac has an interesting article about testing one of the Hitachi 80GB notebook disk drives. The conclusion: The author liked the drive enough that he bought it rather than returning the test disk...
Spring 1.3b3 released Spring has been updated to 1.3b3 with support for nested Safari bookmark folders, a Reveal in Path Finder, and more enhancements. For complete details about the beta release, check the UserCreations weblog.
Qwest, bilking customers as the ship goes down I had yet another run in with Qwest, the phone monopoly here in Washington state this morning. Over the weekend we realized that we could no longer make long distance calls of any kind from our land line, which is serviced by Qwest. Every time we tried to make a call we got a message that we needed to contact our long distance provider, and so this morning after I nearly missed out on a $125 financial earnings call assignment because I couldn't dial a long distance number to listen to the conference call, I called our long distance provider and found all was well with our connection on their end. This is when I knew things were about to get bad, because anytime I have to contact Qwest for customer service I leave far from satisfied. After navigating the Qwest voice mail filters to get to the proper department for customer support, the support tech told me that my long distance provider had been a company called Touch America, a company I had never heard of, and that it would cost me $5 to switch to the long distance provider I was supposed to be using all along. And oh, by the way, Qwest now offers in state and nationwide long distance service and would I like to switch to them? The support tech couldn't understand why I wouldn't switch to Qwest, so I spelled it out to him: The less service I have through Qwest then the less they can screw me over with poor customer support and income padding switch fees for something that they had made a mistake on in the first place. I had to decline offers for Qwest Internet access and more before getting off the phone. After all of this and a $5 fee I still won't have long distance calling on my land line until sometime Friday. Now that is service. It's no wonder I use the cell phone for critical calling these days, and it is no wonder that Qwest as a company continues to go down the tank quarter after quarter. It can't happen to a more deserving company... Discuss Qwest
Dan Wood offers a caution about Safari Dan Wood, the creator of the excellent Watson program, offers an important note about downloading software files using Safari and the way that the cache in the latest public beta version could hamper you if you are re-downloading a file.
An audio capture note for 12-inch PowerBook G4 owners A new AppleCare Knowledge Base article explains why some owners of 12-inch PowerBook G4 machines have experienced oddities with audio captures done on their machines. The gist of the note: Set your display to Never sleep to help avoid an odd bug...
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NetNewsWire 1.0.2 Ranchero Software announced that NetNewsWire 1.0.2 is shipping this afternoon:
Bye bye battery life While I was away this weekend I took my 12-inch PowerBook G4 along for the ride, putting it to sleep around 9:30 a.m. Saturday morning before we left town and then opening it again yesterday morning while we were in the heart of the Cascade Mountain range about 23 hours later. I am still suspecting the power management capabilities of this little laptop as compared to my trusty old Pismo PowerBook, since when I opened the machine after 23 hours of sleeping the battery showed it had just 77% of the battery charge remaining. In short, the battery life dropped 23% in 23 hours. I did a little work with the machine before we set out for yesterday's book research and by the time I slept the machine again it was down to 70%. When I turned the machine on at home last night around 8 p.m. the battery showed 60% of the charge remaining, which means it dropped 40% in roughly 36 hours. Funny, I can't recall sleep costing 1% of battery life per hour of sleep on my Pismo. Does this sound like the kind of battery performance you get with your PowerBook G4? Does it vary between the TiBook, the 17-inch PowerBook G4 and the 12-inch PowerBook G4? Discuss PowerBook G4 battery life
MP3 to AAC converter MacCentral notes: MP3-to-AAC utility available - OvoLab has released AAChoo, a US$15 utility for converting MP3 songs to AAC (Advanced Audio Coding). AAC audio files are supported by iTunes 4 and Apple's third generation of iPods, as well as older iPods with the newest iPod updater installed. [MacCentral] I have to wonder how wise it is to use a converter for this task though, since, if I am understanding this correctly, you would be taking a compressed MP3 file and then compressing it yet again to the new AAC format. As many people know and has been widely written about, compressing audio twice can result in major degradation of the audio quality, much as compressing a digital image twice results in lower quality photos. This program may be a quick shortcut to move hundreds of thousands of previously encoded MP3 files to AAC, but to ensure you are listening to the best possible audio on your AAC files I have yet to hear of a good shortcut to actually re-encoding those original CD tracks directly into AAC. Discuss moving MP3s to AAC
Eudora 6 spam killing features are popular It looks like I am far from the only person interested in the spam filtering capabilities of the new Eudora 6 beta for Mac OS X. Paul Bessex writes about his experiences with the new Eudora beta on Forwarding Address. So far the spam filtering of this app is better than I ever saw with Mail.app, and even though spam has not been a huge problem for me in the past thanks to mail server side spamming done by my host, Digital Forest, over the last few months the spammers have been growing smarter and finding ways to get their crap through server-side filters and into my in box. After moving to Eudora 6.0b18 late last week, those spams are landing in my Junk folder where they can be automatically deleted in X number of user-configurable days. Excellent! Discuss
A reader question: Personal finance apps for Mac OS X An MNJ reader wrote over the weekend asking for tips about which personal finance app to switch to now that he has made the move from Windows to Mac OS X. He had been using Microsoft Money. The first obvious suggestion is to try Quicken, but what other finance apps are people using to their satisfaction under Mac OS X... Discuss finance apps
Recovering from a weekend of nature overload
Expect updates to MNJ throughout the day today as I crawl out from my nature-filled weekend. Natalie and I spent the weekend in Eastern Washington, walking the trails near the confluence of the Wenatchee and Columbia Rivers in Wenatchee, camping at about 1,600 feet elevation in the Cascade Mountains along Icicle Creek near Leavenworth, and then watching butterflies and doing book research in Swakane Canyon along the Columbia River while rain squalls rolled through the area and a thunderstorm raged over the hills on the opposite side of the river. The photo above was taken about this time yesterday, as hundreds of California Tortoiseshell, Mourning Cloak, Purplish Copper, Boisduval Blue, and other butterflies soaked up the sun and gathered salts and minerals from the road alongside Icicle Creek. The butterflies in this shot were California Tortoiseshells...
Eudora back on top? MNJ reader Charles Brownstein says that Eudora is back on top as the best email client for Mac OS X in the wake of a new beta version released earlier this week, and while I have yet to switch over to Eudora to give 6.0b18 a try, the number of new features offered in this version make it sound like a serious improvement. Among the new features detailed in the release notes are built in spam killing using Bayesian filtering, something called Content Concentrator that offers a streamlined view of your email at a glance, and a new mailboxes drawer for Jaguar users that offers access to your list of mailboxes from any mailbox window. There is just enough new in this release to make me curious... To review, Eudora's long-standing strengths as a Mac email client under OS X are speed, the extreme number of high-end features available, and the fact that Eudora uses standard mbox files to store mail rather than a proprietary database. Are you using the new Eudora beta? Discuss Eudora 6.0
Watson updated to 1.7.1 Watson 1.7.1 offers bug fixes for the recently updated search, shopping, and information gathering tool from Karelia Software. Check the company's weblog for more details.
A new beta version of Spring 1.3 A new version of Spring offers better integration with Watson, the ability to convert a Safari bookmark folder to a Spring object, the ability to drag a Finder folder to become a Spring object, and more. Check the UserCreations Weblog for more details about the release.
Mac user writes about his switch, one year later Tim Bray writes about his first iYear and the upside and downsides of moving to Mac OS X and a Titanium PowerBook last spring.
One man's quest to kill spam with Mail.app Mike Wendland is documenting his quest to stop the flood of spam coming into his Mail.app in box by using Rules set up to suppliment the much touted but now floundering spam filtering built into the Apple mail application. There is no doubt that spammers have found ways to get around spam killing schemes, by putting spaces between letters in the keywords and other exploits. I am seeing it too...
Will Passport screw up cost Microsoft $2 trillion? The Register looks at the latest Microsoft bug, this time affecting Passport, which could trigger a huge fine for the Redmond software company. Anyone want to bet that nothing else will be heard about this? That's right...under the rug...
Mac OS X Server 10.2.6 Mac OS X Server 10.2.6 released
OmniGraffle and OmniGraffle Pro updated OmniGraffle, OmniGraffle Pro beta update released - The Omni Group has released an update to their OmniGraffle and OmniGraffle Pro, their diagramming and charting applications for Mac OS X. The new versions, labeled 3.0.1 beta 1, are available for download from The Omni Group's Web site. [MacCentral]
New DVD-R/RW drive from MCE for older PowerBooks MCE ships DVD-R/RW drives for Lombard, Pismo PowerBooks - Peripheral maker MCE Technologies LLC is shipping a DVD-R/RW drive compatible with FireWire and Bronze keyboard-equipped PowerBook G3 models, often known by their internal Apple code names, "Pismo" and "Lombard." [MacCentral] This is good news for users of older PowerBooks like the Pismo we have in our home office here at Mac Net Journal center...
DiskWarrior 3 update finally released Users of newer Macs that will no longer boot from a Mac OS 9.x CD finally have another option in the realm of disk utilities with the release of DiskWarrior 3.0 today. DiskWarrior is a tool for maintaining and rebuilding disk directories and it can fix some disk problems that are otherwise unrecoverable using other disk utilities. DiskWarrior costs $69.95 and upgrades are $39.95 plus $7.95 for shipping and handling. One downside of this update is that the preferred method of getting the program is to get a physical CD that can boot into OS X and run the utility. The Alsoft web site advises it could be 3-4 weeks or more between the time you order the program and the time it arrives...
Mac OS X 10.2.6 update available Apple has rolled out a small update to Mac OS X 10.2.6 which is available via the Software Update panel in System Preferences. The 6.1MB update, as usual, requires a restart after installation. Here are the release notes:
I won't be able to install this update until later this evening, but let's start talking about people's impressions of the new version of Mac OS X now. Discuss Mac OS X 10.2.6
iView supports MPEG-4 and AAC Users of iView MediaPro will be interested to note a short item on the iView MediaPro Weblog today. It explains how iView supports MPEG-4 and AAC music files in its storage capabilities...
New eMacs strike a new affordability level Apple has rolled out revisions of the eMac today that is geared to the education market, but these new machines with a price starting at $799 would be attractive as family computers as well. Though nowhere as inexpensive as the budget-basement PCs that can be found at around $300-400, the low-end eMac is just about desktop equivalent of my new 12-inch PowerBook G4, which cost a ton more than the new high-end eMac at $1,698 with its 1GHz G4 processor, 1GB of RAM, 80GB disk, and SuperDrive that can burn DVDs at 4x compared to the 1x burning capabilities of my Little AlBook. Not bad... Macintouch adds the following note about the new eMacs: Notes and Tips: New eMacs Run Mac OS 9 - Apple says, "Startup in Mac OS 9 is available only with CD-ROM and Combo drive configurations. All configurations can run Mac OS 9 applications in Mac OS X Classic mode." [MacInTouch] Discuss the new eMac
Just got the email about the Bellevue Apple Store
I received email yesterday afternoon about the opening of the new Apple Store in Bellevue, Wash., just an hour or so drive from my home base in Tacoma, Wash. The store opens May 10 and there are the typical kick off events and giveaways. I won't be at the opening though. I will likely drive through Bellevue or close to Bellevue this weekend, but I plan to be out doing research for our Birding Washington book and likely camping in Eastern Washington. We are entering the peak of the spring migration here in the northwest corner of the country and somehow the thought of being out in nature, binoculars in hand, watching warblers, woodpeckers, and if I am lucky and the sun is shining, some fresh and brightly colored butterflies trumps standing in line and gawking at computers. Gotta have priorities. Speaking of birding, this last Saturday Natalie and I scooted across 4,500-foot White Pass to do some more book research in the eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountain range. It was cloudy, so we saw no butterflies on this day, but we did get great views from just a few feet away of the White-headed Woodpecker in the photo above. This was a great surprise. We didn't see a White-headed Woodpecker at all last year, despite looking for one, and in fact his was a first-time sighting for both of us. It made for a great day! I will try to make a visit to the new Apple Store sometime in the first month or so of its being open, but for me the good thing is simply knowing that there are the resources of an Apple Store nearby. Prior to the opening of this new store, the nearest Apple Store was somewhere in California... Discuss Apple Store opening
The real scoop on Orangeware's new wireless driver Glenn Fleishman offers the real scoop on the new wireless drivers from Orangeware:
Music sales bounce Apple stock up 11% Apple Stock Jumps On News Of Strong Music Sales
GraphicConverter updated to version 4.6.1 GraphicConverter 4.6.1 offers the option to download selected images from a digital camera as opposed to all images, a new mail to option added to the contextual menu in the image browser, support for TIFF clipboards under Mac OS X, and a host of other bug fixes and enhancements. GraphicConverter is $35 shareware, or $30 without delivery of an installation CD.
Mozilla Firebird for Mac OS X I spent a few minutes this morning looking at the latest of the daily binaries available for Mozilla Firebird for Mac OS X. The browser is usable now, though definitely still in development, and those working on the browser hope to release a new major update within the next week or so...
The real price of $0.99 tunes from Apple Although it isn't an Earth-shattering price difference, I did find it interesting that a $0.99 tune purchased through the iTunes Music Store actually cost me $1.07 by the time I got the final bill for my single purchase so far. That extra $0.08 is sales tax for my state of Washington, I assume... Discuss the real cost of iTunes purchases
PhotoRescue for grabbing files from corrupt camera media PhotoRescue is a useful file recovery tool made specifically for recovering images from corrupt Smartmedia, Memory Stick, or Compact Flash cards. The $29 program runs on Mac OS X and Windows, and there is a free demo that lets you look at damaged media but not actually save the files found on that media. Unfortunately as I was trying to help a friend recover some images from a dead 512MB Compact Flash card last night the program locked up on me after issuing a number of ominous error messages and I couldn't actually recover the files, but this may still be a useful resource for digital photographers as media corruption becomes more of an issue... Discuss Photo recovery tools
How to use a Sprint PCS phone as a wireless modem John Mortensen offers a step-by-step tutorial on how to set up a Mac OS X machine to access the Internet through a Sanyo Sprint PCS Vision phone...
NetNewsWire 1.0.2b3 NetNewsWire 1.0.2b3
Remember to deauthorize your Mac at sale time MacDailyNews notes: You've been warned - Deauthorize your Mac before you sell or donate it- Apple has posted an AppleCare Knowledge Base Document that explains how authorization works within iTunes 4 and how to authorize and deauthorize a computer. Make sure you don't forget to deauthorize your Mac before you sell it or donate it or you might regret it. [MacDailyNews]
OK...so I bought a tune Not exactly Earth-shattering news, but I did finally have the time to try out the iTunes Music Store and to buy a Barenaked Ladies tune this afternoon. It works. I am not thrilled with the music selection, I am not thrilled with AAC files and the fact that they can pretty much only be played on iTunes, but I may buy a tune here and there. By and large though I would prefer to own my music and have the ability to do what I please with it - to rip it to whatever format I want, to play it on as many of my computers as I want, and simply to know that it is mine and not locked in some format where I can only extract it at the expense of the audio quality. In short, I can't see the iTunes Music Store as a real revolution. It may be easy to use but at least at this stage it only includes major artists and every tune comes with some serious compromises built in.
If you simply must use Mac OS 9.x... Apple has one page in its AppleCare Knowledge Base with links to all of the updates available for Mac OS 9.x. If like me you have older Macs around the home or office running the Classic OS, this could be a good link to keep handy...
NetNewsWire 1.0.2b1 released Brent Simmons has rolled out a new beta version of NetNewsWire, this time adding a bunch of speed and stability enhancements as well as new weblog editing capabilities.
Great tips on Mac compatible Bluetooth phones Macintouch has a reader report about Mac-compatible phones that can work with Bluetooth and iSync. If like me you have been fence sitting on which phone to get, this could be useful info...
Hydra 1.01 speeds up, adds localizations The collaborative text editing environment offered by the freeware program Hydra gets a few fixes and enhancements in its newest release, including localizations in Japanese, Chinese, Swedish, and French and improved speed and stability. Release notes are offered on the news page.
How to fix broken iSync after installing Palm Desktop 4.1 MacOSXHints offers a tip for those whose iSync synchronization was broken after installing this week's new release of Palm Desktop 4.1...
New Mac Developer Directory Brent Simmons notes: Mac Developer Directory - The new Mac Developer Directory is a place where developers can sign up so people looking for developers can find them. [ranchero.com] |
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